Casey Anthony: Bombshell report started with beach read

11:18 p.m. EST, November 20, 2012|By Hal Boedeker, Staff writer

A vacationing Tony Pipitone was reading Jose Baez's book, "Presumed Guilty," on a beach in July and realized something didn't add up. He texted Baez, but couldn't get Casey Anthony's former defense attorney to sit for an interview until October.

He focused on Baez's description of a computer search -- for foolproof suffocation -- on the Anthony family computer on June 16, 2008, the day Caylee Anthony supposedly died.

Pipitone's report threw doubt on Baez's version that George Anthony, Casey's father, conducted the search. That search went to a website that offered information about poisoning, suffocation and plastic bags.

"I want to be clear it doesn't prove Casey murdered her daughter," Pipitone said. "Although the state says they would have used to it to argue she did premeditate murder and that website would have given them fodder for that argument. The defense would have said it was George, but if that were refuted, there is still a possibility it was Casey. But rather than searching for a way to kill her daughter, perhaps she was looking for a way to kill herself."

The state, however, didn't get the computer-search information.

"The sheriff's office failed to provide it," Pipitone said. "The prosecution got, and the sheriff’s office managed to find, less than 2 percent of the browser activity for that day, including it in a spread sheet that has 17 lines in it that deal with computer history. The problem is, it's only from the Internet Explorer browser, which is easily extractable, and not from the Firefox Mozilla 2.0 browser, which they couldn't do, but the defense did."

Prosecutors wouldn't comment on camera for Pipitone's report. Linda Drane Burdick vowed to leave if Pipitone brought a camera crew, he said, adding that she "blanched" at his findings.

Jeff Ashton offered a short comment for the record: "It's just a shame we didn't have it. This certainly would have put the accidental death claim in serious question.’"

The sheriff's office, also off camera, confirmed that it was an oversight not to provide the information, Pipitone said.

Pipitone wondered about the sheriff's office: "Why didn’t they give the hard drive to the FBI? They gave them all this useless information from the crime scene. Why didn’t give it to FDLE? Because they think they have the experts who can do it. Well, obviously, they did not."

In an interview with the Sentinel, Baez described Pipitone's report as suffering from "the standard anti-Casey spin."

But over the years, Pipitone has provided some of the most detailed reporting on the Anthony case. In July 2011, she was acquitted of murder in the death of her daughter.

In the latest report, Pipitone pointed to the password-protected account as key. Casey used it almost exclusively in the Mozilla Firefox browser. George and Cindy Anthony, Casey's parents, used a nonpassword-protected account.

Is it a smoking gun in the case?

"We call it the bombshell that didn't go off," Pipitone said. "It doesn’t prove Casey murdered her daughter. It could prove she did the searches. I believe it's reasonable to infer that she did the search for foolproof suffocation from the evidence. This is not old news."

Rather, Pipitone argued: "It's the most overlooked, underreported and unaccessed information in the case that deals with the most important hour of the most important day of the entire three-year investigation."

Pipitone reported that Baez's timeline for the search was off. "He claims the search happened at 1:51 in the afternoon. That's a time when George would have been at the house," Pipitone said.

Pipitone found that the search happened an hour later, at 2:51. "We're basing that on independently verified server records that match up times with the browser," he said.

So was the news that only Casey Anthony could have made the search?

"You never know who's behind the computer," Pipitone said. "But we know that Casey’s [cell phone is] pinging at the house at that time. George says he had left the house at 2:30 and gotten to work by 3. Jose conceded that he believes George got to work at 3 because he called Casey at 3:02 and 3:04. He says on camera he believes he got there at the time."

Pipitone said he had talked "repeatedly" to Baez about the report. "He stands by the 1:51 time. He says he has several experts who independently verified that time," Pipitone said. "He says it’s based in part on system files I don’t have, which is true. I don’t have system files. I told him last week to send them to me. He hasn’t.”

Pipitone added that the sheriff's office on Monday finally did the job and found the search was at 2:50 p.m., as WKMG has contended.